A group of five friends of Vinit Sancheti, who bled to death after an unknown car rammed into his bike on Saturday, are offering a reward of Rs 25,000 on social networks to anyone who can provide information about the identity of the driver

A group of five friends are determined to find out who the driver of the four-wheeler was, who mowed down their friend Vinit Sancheti. Sancheti (38), a Worli resident, was driving his Yamaha RX 100 motorcycle on the JNPT Road in Panvel on Saturday around 4 pm, when an unknown person driving a four-wheeler rammed into his bike. He immediately fled from the spot, leaving the wheel cap of his vehicle behind.

(Left to Right) Ravi Gaur, Rolland Gotur, Prashant Samant and Dhawal Oza are campaigning to find the driver of the vehicle that rammed into their friend Vinit Sancheti’s (below) motorcycle, which eventually killed him

Sancheti, an event management professional, was bleeding profusely, but nobody came to his help. It was only when traffic started accumulating that a call was made to the Kamothe police, who arrived on the spot around 4.45 pm. The victim had fractured both his legs and had been bleeding from his head. He was immediately rushed to MGM hospital in Kamothe, while the bleeding from his ears and nose increased further.

Vinit Sancheti

By 6.30 pm, Sancheti was declared dead and his body was sent for a post-mortem to the Panvel Municipal Corporation (PMC) Hospital, where the cause of death was determined as haemorrhagic shock due to polytrauma.

Justice for VinitVinit, a Worli resident, has a younger sister, Arpita, and the entire family is in a state of shock. Meanwhile, a group of his school and college friends have taken up the mantle to find the identity of the person responsible for their friend’s death. The group of five includes Dhawal Oza, Hrishikesh Joshi, Ravi Gaur, Prashant Sampat, and Rolland Gotur, who studied with him in Mayo School, Ajmer and Sydenham College, Mumbai.

Even before he was cremated in his hometown Dilwara, Rajasthan, the group created a website, a Facebook page and a Twitter account, asking for support from people to help identify the driver of the four-wheeler. The Facebook page (www.facebook.com/justice4vinit) has garnered 406 likes, and the website is justice4vinit.com.

The sites list the phone numbers of all the five involved in the campaign and ask people to call them up in case anyone has any information of the vehicle. The group is campaigning on Twitter (@Justice4vinit) as well, asking people to spread their message to as many as possible. They have declared a reward of Rs 25,000 for anyone who can help them catch the driver of the vehicle.

Speaking to MiD DAY, Worli resident Dhawal Oza, who was in Sancheti’s hometown during the cremation last morning, said, “We knew Vinit for over a decade. He’s the kind of a guy who would go to help anyone even at 3 am. Unfortunately, no one came to help him and he was left at the accident spot; nobody even bothered to inform the nearby police or hospital.

We have aggressively taken to social media and will keep our efforts on till we nail the killer. We are even planning to put up a poster of him, his bike and the white wheel cap of the car that hit him. The loss of our friend itself has been tragic and not knowing who did this just makes things worse.”

Another friend, Ravi Gaur (40), put the loss akin to losing a limb. “Even as I talk to you, I’m unable to accept the fact that Vinit is gone. The six of us had been thick friends for over a decade. The reason for starting the pages is that we want to expedite the investigations, so that we know who did this to our friend,” said Gaur.

CopspeakKamothe police have registered an FIR and they claim to have already begun investigations. Police Sub-inspector T V Uttekar from Kamothe Police station said that they had found Sancheti bleeding profusely, but nobody took him to the hospital till the police van reached the spot.

He said, “The road where Sancheti was found is known to have traffic on both the sides. Yet, no one came to get the man admitted to the hospital. There is no speed breaker on that stretch, due to which vehicles speed even more. We have found the wheel cap of a Maruti car on the spot and have started our investigations. The stretch does not have many shops expect for a tyre shop, whose owner claims he was not present when the accident occurred.”

The unknown accused has been booked under sections 279 (rash driving), 304A (causing death by negligence), 427 (mischief causing damage) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 184 (driving dangerously) and 134 (duty of driver in case of accident or injury to a person) of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.